Movie Review - - Review/Film; A Master of the Universe Brought Down to Earth - NYTimes.com Review/Film; A Master of the Universe Brought Down to Earth By VINCENT CANBY Published: December 21, 1990 THE value (and fun) of Tom Wolfe's long, Dickensian-detailed, tirelessly satiric novel, "The Bonfire of the Vanities," is in its democratic approach to ridicule. All men are born trashy. Those few who aren't have trashiness thrust upon them. No one entirely escapes Mr. Wolfe's scorn in his withering, moralistic tale about opportunists running amok in New York City in the mid-1980's. They are all there, everyone you might have met at a Park Avenue dinner party or (if you aren't invited to Park Avenue dinner parties) read about in the gossip columns or on page 2 or 3 of the tabloids. The cast is big. It includes even those who are viewed as supporting players on the edge of the screen in the television coverage of a scandal.

Wall Street wizards, ambitious politicians, their flunkies, Harlem punks, society women who are see-through thin, ministers with an eye for the main chance, interior decorators, fashionable poets, discarded wives, mistresses on the prowl, plus the cops, the stretch-limo drivers and the other faceless, functional people who service them. They are white, black, gentile, Jewish. Mr. Wolfe is an equal-opportunity chronicler of the absurd. His New York City is fictional, though it closely resembles the one over which Edward I. Koch presided as Mayor, when Ronald and Nancy Reagan were the pace setters in the White House. "The Bonfire of the Vanities" is a historical novel about a time and place in which everything and everybody had a price. This ecumenical approach is what gives "Bonfire" its tone. By being consistent, the novel transcends its own cynicism to become healthily skeptical. This is just what Brian De Palma's gross, unfunny movie adaptation does not do. The story is a good one.

Sherman McCoy (Tom Hanks), a well-born successful Wall Street bond salesman, sneaks off to meet his mistress, Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith), when she comes into Kennedy Airport from Italy. On the way back to town, they take the wrong exit from the Triborough Bridge, winding up in unknown reaches of the Bronx, fearful for their lives as well as for his very expensive, showy imported car. After many twists and turns, they come to a lonely dead end where, while they are stopped, they're threatened by two young black men. There's a scuffle. With Maria behind the wheel, they make a desperate getaway, leaving one man badly hit as they run. From this small beginning, and faster than an ailanthus tree in a vacant lot, a giant scandal grows. When the feckless Sherman, self-styled "master of the universe" for his wheeling and dealing on Wall Street, is arraigned on hit-and-run charges, he becomes everybody's ticket to fame, fortune, community influence or political office. The racist Jewish District Attorney Weiss (F. Murray Abraham), who wants to be Mayor, sees the case as his chance to convince black voters that he is no racist.

The Reverend Bacon (John Hancock), a militant black clergyman, becomes the adviser to and spokesman for the injured man's family. While hospitalized, the injured man himself (Patrick Malone) is made over into a symbol of the city's oppressed, a dedicated scholar and victim of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heedlessness. Orchestrating much of the hoopla is Peter Fallow (Bruce Willis), a reporter for a tabloid called The City Light, who uses the story to save his job and then blows it up into a series that wins him a Pulitzer Prize. This is the plot, or the bones of it, anyway. It's a touchy one, with something to offend everyone. The novel works, at least in part, because it is so comically rude and so minutely detailed. In adapting it to the screen, Mr. De Palma and Michael Cristofer, who wrote the screenplay, have made a series of wrong decisions that have the effect of both softening the satire and making it seem more uncomfortably racist than the Wolfe original. As if to echo the novel's overstatement, and to tell the audience that what it's seeing is truth exaggerated, Mr.

De Palma and his cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, favor the use of lenses that give ordinary people the faces of gargoyles, and oddball camera angles that suggest a horror film more often than a social satire. The sets are alternately too much -- too fancy -- and too little, that is, utterly realistic. The movie never seems to know what it's supposed to be. It wobbles. The casting isn't ideal. Mr. Hanks comes off best as the bewildered victim. He's nobody's idea of a prototypical Yale man, which is the way he's described in the novel, but he's a good comic actor. It also helps that Sherman McCoy, a sort of late-20th-century Candide, is required to do little more than respond to the viciousness of others. Mr. Willis and Miss Griffith play their roles as straight as possible, but still seem to be cyphers. Their roles are flat, but without having the clear-cut definition of the cartoon figures that surround them. This is why the members of the supporting cast seem so much more vivid. They play one-dimensional comic types who get on and off fast: Mr. Abraham, Kim Cattrall (Mr.

Hanks's socially proper wife), Saul Rubinek (an ambitious but dimwitted assistant district attorney), Robert Stephens (a publisher possibly suggested by Rupert Murdoch). Off in left field somewhere is Morgan Freeman, who appears as the movie's conscience, an invention of Mr. Cristofer and Mr. De Palma. He is the black judge (in the novel, he is Jewish) who, at the end of the film, delivers an upbeat sermon on justice (also an invention) devised to deny the validity of just about everything that has gone on before. There's nothing especially wrong with the words, but they don't fit the movie they're in. More surprising is what seems to be the film's technical flaws. There are times when the dialogue sounds disconnected from the speaker, as if post-synchronized. Some scenes are awkwardly staged, including the initial confrontation in the Bronx. In one brief love scene, Miss Griffith's body appears to be so perfect as to look surgically reconstructed. Perhaps not, but "The Bonfire of the Vanities" is so wildly uneven that everything in it seems open to question. "The Bonfire of the Vanities" has been rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian).

It includes partial nudity and vulgar language. THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES Directed and produced by Brian De Palma, screenplay by Michael Cristofer, based on the novel by Tom Wolfe; director of photography, Vilmos Zsigmond; film editors, David Ray and Bill Pankow; music by Dave Grusin; production designer, Richard Sylbert; released by Warner Brothers. Running time: 125 minutes. This film is rated R. Sherman McCoy . . . Tom Hanks Peter Fallow . . . Bruce Willis Maria Ruskin . . . Melanie Griffith Judy McCoy . . . Kim Cattrall Jed Kramer . . . Saul Rubinek Judge White . . . Morgan Freeman Reverend Bacon . . . John Hancock Tom Killian . . . Kevin Dunn Henry Lamb . . . Patrick Malone District Attorney Weiss . . . F. Murray Abraham Sir Gerald Moore . . .

Robert Stephens �The Bonfire of the Vanities� (R) �The Bonfire of the Vanities� (R) By Desson Howe Washington Post Staff Writer December 21, 1990 What to do with Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities," a satirical cluster bomb of a novel, which caught just about every conceivable New York social or racial group, from Bronx blacks to white co-op owners? Director Brian DePalma doesn't do anything with the book at all. He just makes his own movie. While it keeps the "Bonfire" title, the film throws Wolfe's downer ending out of court, reinvents three of the story's most significant characters (not counting weak-chinned Tom Hanks as strong-chinned Ivy Leaguer Sherman McCoy) and replaces the novel with a broad, almost-pratfalling black comedy. The tone of the film is a vanity of its own. With the help of cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (a man who never met a dizzying angle he didn't like), DePalma limbos below his subjects, soars above them, encircles them and brings the lens in close so characters' faces look like gargoyles.

This is comic-book coverage. If the strength of the novel was the interplay between Wolfe's dry-white reportage and the sensational, tabloid-tacky humorous events he wrote about, "Vanities"-the-movie just goes for the tacky jugular. The movie, however, does have crowd-appealing star presence: Melanie Griffith (as a ditsy, malaprop-happy Southerner), Bruce Willis (a sleazy, alcoholic reporter) and Morgan Freeman (as a freewheeling Bronx judge). In terms of what is asked of them, they certainly do their job. Also in the film's favor, "Vanities" at least preserves the novel's fatalistic sense of momentum -- McCoy's spiraling, rapid descent from Manhattan millionaire to manslaughter defendant in a Bronx criminal court. That descent begins when Hanks and mistress Griffith take a wrong turn in the Bronx. Hassled by two black youths, they escape in a panic, accidentally knocking down one of the assailants. The victim, just before slipping into a life-threatening coma, recalls Hanks's Mercedes-Benz and the first letter of his license plate.

Add to this incident the scoop-hungry ambitions of Willis, a hard-drinking reporter on a descent of his own, the political agendas of district attorney F. Murray Abraham and rabble-rousing black preacher John Hancock, as well as the racially explosive atmosphere of New York, and it makes for a volatile, black-versus-white circus trial. DePalma has enough courage to lampoon blacks and whites (he wouldn't have much material to work with otherwise). But he makes Freeman play what was, in the book, a Jewish judge, so that a black man delivers the politically sensitive final decision. He also injects a nauseating thumbs-up message about America's justice system. A didactic passage of bunk, it's probably the last thing Wolfe wanted to say. But in a major movie, it seems to be the first thing one has to say. Copyright The Washington Post The Bonfire of the Vanities Audiobook | Tom Wolfe | Audible.com "TEN STARS" THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES is perhaps one of the most entertaining audiobooks I have listened to in a long time.

The reader, Joe Barrett, does a fantastic job bringing the satirical nature of the story to life and actually enhances what is a very well-written book. Some may say the story is dated, but I believe it could very well fit into today's world of Wall Street greed, strained race relations, and two-faced politicians. Tom Wolfe is one of America's best living writers, and this book ranks among his most popular works. By the way - do NOT see the movie directed by Brian Depalma. It is a piece of garbage that in no way resembles this great work of art. If you HAVE seen the film, listen to this book. It will redeem your opinion of the story. "Big mistake" Three hours in, and I began to realize what a colossal mistake I've been making with audiobooks. I've been giving five stars to lots of books, books I really enjoyed, books that kept me listening way beyond time to quit, well-narrated books, all of them the kind of thing I knew I'd remember for a long time. All those were good books, great books, maybe. But now, what do I do with this book? "Bonfire of the Vanities"?

This book -- as written and narrated -- is so far beyond all those other books I've loved, what do I do now? Only five stars are available! The other thing is, I could easily write a book setting forth all the reasons why this is the best audiobook I've ever listened to -- well, on a par with my other all-time favorite, "Angela's Ashes", which - up until now -- I'd decided was the only other PERFECT audiobook I'd come across. Now there are two. I won't write a book about it, I won't even say much more, except for one thing: if you've read this far, and decide NOT to buy this book, you're a damn fool. This is the experience of a lifetime, an experience that will draw you in, wrap you up, and then spit you out 27 hours later, exhausted, limp with emotion, and knowing only one thing: you've got to listen to it again.

And as to Joe Barrett, the narrator, there should be a lifetime uber-superior award for his interpretation of this book -- he handled everything with perfection, the gazillions of New York accents, of every possible ethnicity, he slam-dunked the various complicated medical terms, not even Yiddish threw him off his stride. This book is worth it for the narration alone. Buy it. Download, and click it on. You're gonna be missing the experience of a lifetime if you don't. "Disposable literature at its best" That's a harsh characterization that is as true as it is misleading. It's true because Wolfe has written a book so deeply steeped in the specific era it was written that it only makes sense in that one context. It's also a tawdry story of little lasting literary merit. It's misleading because that tawdry story does in fact have elements of the universal in it, plus that plethora of 1980s cultural references makes it a charming time capsule of what things were like. This is a terrifically entertaining book. It's a vivid reminder of how much things are still the same and how much things have changed. Joe Barrett does a terrific job of getting all the voices and accents down right.

Wolfe does a terrific job of portraying all the different agendas and the ambiguity of how a single version of the facts can be perceived so very differently by all the parties involved. NYTimes November 1, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 1; Book Review Desk Byline: By FRANK CONROY; Frank Conroy is the author of ''Stop-Time,'' an autobiography, and ''Midair,'' a collection of stories. Lead: LEAD: THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES By Tom Wolfe. 659 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $19.95. Text: THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES By Tom Wolfe. 659 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $19.95. NOW comes Tom Wolfe, aging enfant terrible, with his first novel, (his first novel!), six hundred and fifty-nine pages of raw energy about New York City and various of its inhabitants - a big, bitter, funny, craftily plotted book that grabs you by the lapels and won't let go.

As in much of his other work, such as ''The Right Stuff,'' Mr. Wolfe's strategy is to somehow batter the reader into submission, using an incantatory repetition of certain emblematic phrases, (HIS FIRST NOVEL!), detailed description of people's clothing, hyperbole, interior monologue whenever he feels like it, and various other New Journalism devices he is apparently too fond of to give up. What is amazing is that he gets away with it. I read ''The Bonfire of the Vanities'' straight through, in two sessions on two consecutive days, and enjoyed it enormously. It swept me right up. When he writes about process he knows what he is writing about, whether it's the Wall Street bond market, the Bronx District Attorney's Office, print and television journal-ism, or the working habits of sleazy lawyers -the man knows how to prepare and he knows how to research. As well, he knows how to tell a story, and how to make us laugh, qualities not always present in the work of some of the more polished, more literary or ultimately more ambitious novelists of his generation.

The novel relates the fall of Sherman McCoy, an investment banker making a million a year who seems blind to everything except appearances, sex and money. He lives in the middle of New York City without knowing New York City. He seems barely to know his decorative wife, his decorative daughter or his libidinous mistress, to say nothing of himself. He's all surface is Sherman, and when he blunders off the expressway into the welfare jungle of the South Bronx in his $48,000 Mercedes, into the biggest trouble of his heretofore charmed life, he is without reserves of experience, imagination or moral awareness with which to guide himself. All he's got is adrenalin and fear, fear and adrenalin. He's a sort of carefully bred white rat in Dr. Wolfe's urban laboratory of horrors, destined to run mazes and endure shocks for our edification and amusement. (His first novel!) The action jumps back and forth from upper-class Sherman, or to borrow some lingo from the recording industry, from Sherman's track, to the Criminal-Justice-System-in-the-Bronx track - involving assistant D.A.

Kramer (a working slob), Judge Kovitsky (burnt out), various cops and other marginally middle-class types - to the corrupt media track, involving the degenerate newspaper reporter Peter Fallow (writing for a thinly disguised New York Post), to the venal lower-class black track and the hypocritical and aptly named Reverend Bacon. There are dozens of minor characters on each track, and Mr. Wolfe does a fine job of keeping them all under control and in clear focus, while the major characters spiral in on each other toward the final explo-sive courtroom scene. Mr. Wolfe writes in such a way as to make us read him quickly. Very quickly. (Indeed, if one lingers over the pages the sensation is something like hearing a 78 r.p.m. record played at 33 1/3. One perceives the structure, but misses the essence.) Fast as it is - like falling downstairs, sometimes - the pace is superb, and the action, twists of plot, comic setups and jumps from track to track always occur at just the right times. The plot is simple.

Sherman screws up and the dark forces of the city close in on his rich white butt - but the presentation, or the attenuated revelation of the plot, is admirably complex, and allows for the weaving in of much interesting ancillary material. Mr. Wolfe never cheats the reader. He works hard to get every last bit of juice from every scene, every situation. And yet, when the author has let go of your lapels and the book is over, there is an odd aftertaste, not entirely pleasant. Maybe he doesn't entirely get away with it. HOMOPHONIC attempts to recreate regional or class accents are only irritating. '' 'N thin mibby nuthun'' seems clumsy rather than Southern. ''Muh uhms uh shakin'' seems strained. Nor is the urban black speech, Long Island WASP or New Yorkese any better. Mr. Wolfe misses, it seems to me, because of a tendency to embrace the grotesque. It is the fact of an accent, rather that the quality or nature of it, that interests him. Elmore Leonard, for instance, goes after the sound and rhythm of certain accents, and does it very well without any tortured spelling.

(So does James Baldwin, for that matter.) Mr. Wolfe writes with another agenda, with a kind of malicious glee, and exaggerates in order to make fun of his characters, with whom, truth be told, he has not much sympathy. What they say is fine -the dialogue is fine - but I wish he'd just let them say it, and let my own ear do the work. The relentless writing about clothing becomes tiresome. As new characters enter the narrative we are immediately told, at length and in elaborate detail, what they are wearing, as if the key to an understanding of their souls might emerge from that information. Again, malice is involved. Sherman, in his $1,800 imported suit and British hand-lasted shoes is, ipso facto, an arriviste and a poseur. A detective wearing ''a sport jacket and the sort of brown pants a wife might choose to go with it'' has obviously delegated too much authority. Professors wear ''rotting tweeds,'' blacks wear running shoes. Everyone is slightly absurd. Mr. Wolfe seems unable to imagine a character who gets dressed simply to avoid being naked.

The clothes are always understood to be a choice, a statement, expressing some folly or character flaw or some lie. There is so much about clothes, about appearances, that the author runs the risk of being understood to say that's all there is. In what is otherwise a fine scene in one of the best extended sequences in the book, Sherman is in a holding cell with some tough Latinos and blacks: '' 'Yo! Look at me when I'm talking to you!' ''Sherman turned his head toward him. Pure malevolence! '' 'I ask you for a drink, and you wasn't nice, but I'm going to give you a chance to make up for that . . . see . . . I'm feeling cold, man. I want your coat. Gimme your coat.' ''My coat! my clothes! ''Sherman's mind raced. He couldn't speak. He shook his head no.'' Considering the sorts of things Sherman might reasonably be expected to be worrying about in such a situation this seems less symbolic than anticlimactic. Mr. Wolfe will forgive me if my mind does not reel in shock at the prospect of Sherman losing his jacket.

In an epilogue, written as a New York Times story printed a year after the action of the novel, Mr. Wolfe tries to make the point that Sherman is a changed man, now the hounded creature of the criminal justice system. ''Mr. McCoy, 39, was dressed in an open-necked sport shirt, khaki pants, and hiking shoes. . . . in sharp contrast to the $2,000 custom-tailored English suits he was famous for.'' Novelists often try to show us how people have changed by describing what they do or say. Mr. Wolfe makes gestures in that direction, but he always falls back on appearances, on descriptions of surfaces. As it turns out, it doesn't matter if we believe Sherman has changed (which is lucky, because we don't). It is enough that we believe he went through the fire. The odd aftertaste may be in part because there aren't any people in the book who seem to exist independent of the author's will, no one with enough depth to surpass his or her accent, clothing, class or situation, no one for whom believable change is possible. They are all victims of fashion or other surface forces.

The fun of the book, and much of its energy, comes from watching Mr. Wolfe eviscerate one pathetic character after another. And he is good at it, really brilliant sometimes - whether it be a society matron or a Jewish business tycoon making money running charter jets to Mecca for Arabs - but after a while, when it turns out that everyone is pathetic (except for me and thee, of course), the fun can turn sour. Malice is a powerful spice. Too much can ruin the stew, and Mr. Wolfe comes close. But in the end everyone is going to read the book, and no one is going to ask for any money back. It positively hums with energy. There are dozens of fine scenes, set pieces, a strong story line, lots of laughs and a solid, psychologically penetrating piece of imaginative writing about Sherman going into the slammer. ''The Bonfire of the Vanities'' (an earlier version of which ran in serial form in Rolling Stone magazine) may be closer to R. Crumb than to Theodore Dreiser, but it satisfies. It definitely does it to you, and isn't that what it's all about?

CHARGE OF THE NEW BREED At Seventy-ninth Street and First Avenue the taxis lined up every day to take the young Masters of the Universe down to Wall Street. . . . It was a ten-dollar ride each morning, but what was that to a Master of the Universe? Sherman's father had always taken the subway to Wall Street, even when he was the chief executive officer of Dunning Sponget & Leach. Even now, at the age of seventy-one, when he took his daily excursions to Dunning Sponget to breathe the same air as his lawyer cronies for three or four hours, he went by subway. It was a matter of principle. The more grim the subways became, the more graffiti those people scrawled on the cars, the more gold chains they snatched off girls' necks, the more old men they mugged, the more women they pushed in front of the trains, the more determined was John Campbell McCoy that they weren't going to drive him off the New York City subways. But to the new breed, the young breed, the masterful breed, Sherman's breed, there was no such principle. Insulation! That was the ticket.

That was the term Rawlie Thorpe used. ''If you want to live in New York,'' he once told Sherman, ''you've got to insulate, insulate, insulate,'' meaning insulate yourself from those people. The cynicism and smugness of the idea struck Sherman as very au courant. If you could go breezing down the FDR Drive in a taxi, then why file into the trenches of the urban wars? From ''The Bonfire of the Vanities.'' Tom Wolfe About Tom Wolfe Tom Wolfe was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. He was educated at Washington and Lee (B.A., 1951) and Yale (Ph.D., American Studies, 1957) universities. In December 1956, he took a job as a reporter on the Springfield (Massachusetts) Union. This was the beginning of a ten-year newspaper career, most of it spent as a general assignment reporter. For six months in 1960 he served as The Washington Post's Latin American correspondent and won the Washington Newspaper Guild's foreign news prize for his coverage of Cuba.

In 1962 he became a reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune and, in addition, one of the two staff writers (Jimmy Breslin was the other) of New York magazine, which began as the Herald-Tribune's Sunday supplement. While still a daily reporter for the Herald-Tribune, he completed his first book, a collection of articles about the flamboyant Sixties written for New York and Esquire and published in 1965 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux as The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby . The book became a bestseller and established Wolfe as a leading figure in the literary experiments in nonfiction that became known as New Journalism. In 1968 he published two bestsellers on the same day: The Pump House Gang , made up of more articles about life in the sixties, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , a nonfiction story of the hippie era. In 1970 he published Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers , a highly controversial book about racial friction in the United States.

The first section was a detailed account of a party Leonard Bernstein gave for the Black Panthers in his Park Avenue duplex, and the second portrayed the inner workings of the government's poverty program. Even more controversial was Wolfe's 1975 book on the American art world, The Painted Word . The art world reacted furiously, partly because Wolfe kept referring to it as the "art village," depicting it as a network of no more than three thousand people, of whom about three hundred lived outside the New York metropolitan area. In 1976 he published another collection, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine , which included his well-known essay "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening." In 1979 Wolfe completed a book he had been at work on for more than six years, an account of the rocket airplane experiments of the post World War II era and the early space program focusing upon the psychology of the rocket pilots and the astronauts and the competition between them. The Right Stuff became a bestseller and won the American Book Award for nonfiction, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Harold Vursell Award for prose style, and the Columbia Journalism Award.

"The right stuff," "radical chic," and "the Me Decade" (sometimes altered to "the Me Generation") all became popular phrases, but Wolfe seems proudest of "good ol' boy," which he introduced to the written language in a 1964 article in Esquire about Junior Johnson, the North Carolina stock car racing driver, which was called "The Last American Hero." Wolfe had been illustrating his own work in newspapers and magazines since the 1950s, and in 1977 he began doing a monthly illustrated feature for Harper's Magazine called "In Our Time." The book In Our Time , published in 1980, featured these drawings and many others. In 1981 he wrote a companion to The Painted Word entitled From Bauhaus to Our House , about the world of American architecture. In 1984 and 1985 Wolfe wrote his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities , in serial form against a deadline of every two weeks for Rolling Stone magazine. It came out in book form in 1987.

A story of the money-feverish 1980s in New York, The Bonfire of the Vanities was number one of the New York Times bestseller list for two months and remained on the list for more than a year, selling over 800,000 copies in hardcover. It also became the number-one bestselling paperback, with sales above two million. In 1989 Wolfe outraged the literacy community with an essay in Harper's called "Stalking the Billion-footed Beast." In it he argued that the only hope for the future of the American novel was a Zolaesque naturalism in which the novelist becomes the reporter-as he had done in writing The Bonfire of the Vanities, which was recognized as the essential novel of America in the 1980s. In 1996 Wolfe wrote the novella "Ambush at Fort Bragg" as a two-part series for Rolling Stone. In 1997 it was published as a book in France and Spain and as an audiotape in the United States.

An account of a network television magazine show's attempt to trap three soldiers at Fort Bragg into confessing to the murder of one of their comrades, it grew out of what had been intended as one theme in a novel Wolfe was working on at that time. The novel, A Man in Full , was published in November 1998. The book's protagonists are a sixty-year-old Atlanta real estate developer whose empire has begun a grim slide toward bankruptcy and a twenty-three-year-old manual laborer who works in the freezer unit of a wholesale food warehouse in Alameda County, California, owned by the developer. Before the story ends, both have had to face the question of what is it that makes a man "a man in full" now, at the beginning of a new century and a new millennium. A Man in Full headed the New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks and has sold nearly 1.4 million copies in hardcover.

The book's tremendous commercial success, its enthusiastic welcome by reviewers, and Wolfe's appearance on the cover of Time magazine in his trademark white suit plus a white homburg and white kid gloves-along with his claim that his sort of detailed realism was the future of the American novel, if it was going to have one-provoked a furious reaction among other American novelists, notably John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving. In October 2000 Wolfe published Hooking Up, a collection of fiction and non fiction concerning the turn of the new century, entitled Hooking Up. It included Ambush at Fort Bragg and, for the first time since their original publication in the Herald-Tribune, his famous essays on William Shawn and The New Yorker, "Tiny Mummies!" and "Lost in the Whichy Thickets." His new novel I Am Charlotte Simmons , is now available in paperback from Picador. Wolfe lives in New York City with his wife, Sheila; his daughter, Alexandra; and his son, Tommy.

THE COLD HEART OF BONFIRE | The Weekly Standard Scroll down for next story THE MAGAZINE: From the November 17 Issue THE COLD HEART OF BONFIRE Tom Wolfe wrote the first draft of his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities as a serial in Rolling Stone magazine, in 1984 and 1985, and he was only halfway through before his story was, as the phrase goes, overtaken by events. Novels are not supposed to be overtaken by events, of course. We're used to thinking of them as works of pure invention, and thus not susceptible to getting tripped up by the morning's headlines. But Wolfe's ambition was as much reportorial as imaginative. Nov 17, 1997 | By Andrew Ferguson Andrew Ferguson Senior Editor The Weekly Standard Sorry, you've reached the limit on the articles you can view. Tom Wolfe wrote the first draft of his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities as a serial in Rolling Stone magazine, in 1984 and 1985, and he was only halfway through before his story was, as the phrase goes, overtaken by events.

Novels are not supposed to be overtaken by events, of course. We're used to thinking of them as works of pure invention, and thus not susceptible to getting tripped up by the morning's headlines. But Wolfe's ambition was as much reportorial as imaginative. He wanted to capture the grisly carnival of New York City at the mid-point of the 1980s: roiling, putrescent New York, bubbling with irreconcilable ethnic hatreds, wobbling between unimaginable wealth and horrifying squalor, exploited by cynical pols, money-grubbers, and charlatans. He captured it only too well. To take an example that Wolfe related several years later: In an early Rolling Stone installment, he had described one of his characters, an assistant DA in the Bronx, riding the subway, "his eyes jumping about in a bughouse manner." In a future chapter, the author had planned to explain the young man's subway-phobia: He had once been attacked and robbed by a "wolf pack" of thugs on a train in the Bronx. This, in any case, was Wolfe's intention.

But not long after the early chapter was published, a real-life wolf pack descended on the tightly wound subway-rider Bernhard Goetz, with spectacular consequences. Wolfe's little plot twist was undone. "Now how could I," he wrote, "proceed with my plan? People would say, This poor fellow Wolfe, he has no imagination. He reads the newspapers, gets these obvious ideas . . . . So I abandoned the plan, dropped it altogether." There are other examples. Wolfe gave us Rev. Reginald Bacon, a Harlem preacher and poverty pimp who uses the accidental death of a black teenager to rouse the rabble. Three months after the novel was published, the Tawana Brawley hoax brought the indescribable Rev. Al Sharpton to prominence. Sharpton, as Wolfe noted, made Bacon look like a divinity student. Then there was Howard Beach, and Crown Heights -- spasms of ferocious race hatred that seemed old news after Bonfire. And when Wolfe recorded with almost sensual precision the money-delirium of Reagan-era Wall Street, the excesses seemed impossible to sustain. Sure enough: As the novel hit the bookstores in late October 1987, the market crashed.

"Not for a moment did I ever think of The Bonfire of the Vanities as prophetic," Wolfe has written. But the comment is too modest. For its prescience, and for much else, Bonfire was the most successful and celebrated novel of its day. For people of a certain cohort -- college educated, urban-dwelling, now pushing 40 or 50 -- Bonfire comes as close to a universal literary experience as their generation is ever likely to possess. You could go to a party and talk about it with almost anyone, as, more commonly, you can talk about a hit movie and assume that just about everybody has seen it. Tout le monde, as Wolfe likes to say, read Bonfire (and called it that, by the way: just Bonfire). It's still in print, and ten years to the month after its publication, it deserves another visit. It still retains the power to dazzle, and to disappoint. And to instruct as well -- in ways even its far-sighted author could not have foreseen. The first thing you notice re-reading Tom Wolfe's novel is Tom Wolfe.

The same is true of every Tom Wolfe book, for even in his journalism his literary talent is almost blinding -- preposterously large. There seems to be nothing he can't do with words. His touch is always exact, always sure. The prose is famously idiosyncratic, with its italics and exclamation points and multiplying ellipses, but to achieve his powerful effects he relies on these gimmicks much less than his critics have maintained. Mark Twain said that the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between a flash of lightning and a firefly. Wolfe's paragraphs are a series of lightning bolts. Here he introduces us to the hostess of a Fifth Avenue dinner party. A blazing boney little woman popped out from amid all the clusters in the entry gallery and came toward them. She was an X ray with a teased blond pageboy bob and many tiny grinning teeth. Her emaciated body was inserted into a black-and-red dress with ferocious puffed shoulders, a very narrow waist, and a long skirt. Her face was wide and round -- but without an ounce of flesh on it . . . .

Her clavicle stuck out so far Sherman had the feeling he could reach out and pick up the two big bones. He could see lamplight through her rib cage. Every page offers a half-dozen exquisitely observed details These range from pitch-perfect dialogue --"He galvanizes people to challenge the power structure," a left-wing lawyer says, with a straight face, of Rev. Bacon -- to Wolfe's well-known obsession with clothes. Some of the sartorial references now seem incomprehensible. "He wore a white necktie with a black crisscross pattern, the sort of necktie that Anwar Sadat used to wear." (Anwar Sadat?) More effectively he dwells on the minutiae of work and money -- the minutiae, that is, that overwhelm and consume us all but that most novelists overlook, for misbegotten reasons of taste, presumably. The book's main character, Sherman McCoy, is going broke while earning a million dollars a year; Wolfe takes us through the balance sheets to show us how, with figures rounded off to the nearest thousand. Wolfe's most unexpected gift is shown in his handling of the book's enormous plot.

At every turn of the wheel the gears engage and disengage with Swiss precision To sketch the famous story one more time: Sherman is a bond trader, living with his wife and trophy daughter in a $ 2.5 million co-op on Park Avenue. His principle of urban living is "Insulation! That was the ticket. If you want to live in New York . . . you've got to insulate, insulate, insulate, meaning insulate yourself from those people " But those people keep obtruding One night, Sherman and his mistress end up on a deserted Bronx street in his $ 48,000 Mercedes They are confronted by two young black men, and in the ensuing panic one of the kids is hit by the car, falls into a coma, and eventually dies. Sherman and his mistress escape back to the safety of Manhattan But within days the insulation begins to unravel. Bonfire is a novel of inversions. A novelist of an earlier time -- say, one of the great realists that Wolfe admires, like Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis - - would spin out from this accident a tale of urban neglect, turning the black teenager's fate into a parable of the establishment's indifference.

But in Bonfire, in 1980s New York, where the sky "glows as if inflamed by fever," the forces of the new establishment are mobilized against Sherman. The unlucky teenager is inflated into an "honor student," the "pride of a South Bronx housing project," by a tabloid desperate to appease the city's organized race hustlers. The Bronx district attorney sees in Sherman the answer to his prayers for a "Great White Defendant." Rev. Bacon plays the city's media like a calliope, to his own aggrandizement. Sherman's life collapses, and by the novel's bitter close he is a "professional defendant," with the vultures closing in "to devour at leisure the last plump white meat on the bones of capitalism." Bonfire carries echoes, some subtle, some less so, of earlier American classics. A hit-and-run accident proves the undoing of Jay Gatsby as it does of Sherman McCoy, for instance -- but with a crucial difference When the dust clears in Fitzgerald's novel, the parvenu Gatsby is dead, the low-born Myrtle and her husband are dead, and the aristocrat Daisy survives.

In Gatsby's America the aristocrats always sail off untouched, regardless of the wreckage they leave in their wake. But in Bonfire, it's the aristocrat who's ruined, and the parvenu (Sherman's mistress, who drove the car as it hit the teenager) is the one who survives, even flourishes. From Gatsby to Bonfire, the country has changed -- been turned on its head, in fact. Not that Wolfe treats Sherman sympathetically; with rare exceptions, Wolfe treats none of his characters sympathetically. The description of the party hostess, quoted above, is notable not only for its exactness and humor but also for its cruelty. Wolfe's characters are clouded by self-delusion, motivated by vanity alone; he doesn't like them and neither do we. For that matter, they don't even like one another. The layers of mutual contempt reach a fugue-like complexity. One scene brings together a group of British expatriates at a favorite watering hole. Being British, they have resolved not to pay the tab, and so look for an American to pay it. They ask the minor character Ed Fiske to join them, and then pretend to care about his boring conversation.

The Brits hung on every word with rapt and beaming faces, as if he were the most brilliant raconteur they had come across in the New World. They chuckled, they laughed, they repeated the tag end of his sentences, like a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus. Mr. Ed Fiske kept talking, gaining steadily in confidence and fluency. The drink had hit the spot. What admiring British faces all around him! How they beamed! They did indeed appreciate the art of conversation! With casual largesse he ordered a round of drinks . . . . . . until one by one the Brits slip away, sticking him with the $ 200 bill. The scene is incidental to the plot, and it's very funny and superbly drawn, but it's unsettling nonetheless. It captures in miniature the author's attitude to his creations: The Brits despise Ed Fiske for his delusion and vanity, and Wolfe despises them for despising him, but in the end he finds Ed Fiske as appalling as they do. There's something chilly at the center of the bonfire, a lump of ice where the book's heart should be.

Sherman himself is merely an instrument of his own vanity and delusion, and so when his life collapses it's not so much a tragedy as a comeuppance. The fiery trials he passes through burn away his conceit and self-satisfaction, and alone among the major characters he at last sees himself and his position in life unblinkered. And in the New York of Bonfire, his hard-won self-awareness is a state indistinguishable from madness. By the end Sherman is a freak -- carrion for society's vultures. But he had it coming. There is one wholly admirable character in Bonfire: the old judge who tries Sherman's case. Mike Kovitsky works in the courts of the Bronx County Building. "They had been built at a time, the early 1930s, when it was still assumed that the very look of a courtroom should proclaim the gravity and omnipotence of the rule of law." Kovitsky embodies this older, higher aspiration, but to no effect. Even he succumbs finally to Wolfe's fatalism. Wolfe has elsewhere remarked how much he admires the scene from Huckleberry Finn in which Colonel Sherburn faces down a mob that has come to lynch him.

With the rabble at his doorstep, Sherburn appears at an upper window, a shotgun cradled in his arms. "The idea of you lynching anybody!" Sherburn shouts. "It's amusing. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man! . . . Why a man's safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind --as long as it's daytime and you're not behind him . . . . Now the thing for you to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole." The "crowd washed back sudden," and the lesson is unmistakable: The courage of an individual, of a real man, will by right triumph over the mob. Kovitsky is such a man, too, and at Bonfire's climax, he chooses to face down the lawless herd of bellowing hysterics gathered outside the Bronx County Building. But . . . At that moment Kovitsky threw open both glass doors in front of him. His robes billowed out like enormous black wings . . . Kovitsky stopped in the doorway, arms outstretched. The moment lengthened . . . lengthened . . . The arms dropped.

The billowing wings collapsed against his frail body. He turned around and walked back inside the lobby. His eyes were down, and he was muttering. The mob rages on, and honorable men like Kovitsky find themselves powerless before the consuming bonfire. What we have here, in other words, is a profoundly pessimistic book. Its plot spins and buzzes and races along with great humor and enormous energy, but always under a low overhang of Spenglerian gloom. There are remarkably few anachronisms in Bonfire, ten years on --Wolfe has one male character wear an earring, for example, to signal that he's a street thug; nowadays even bond traders wear earrings. But the largest anachronism, a reader notes today with some relief, is precisely Wolfe's pessimism. After all, the economic boom of the 1980s is still humming in the '90s; New York itself is a vastly cleaner, safer place than the city Wolfe described. The need to insulate, insulate, is less now than it has been in forty years. Even the graffti on the subway cars, so lovingly described in Bonfire, have been cleaned up.

And the book's candor about race, which created such a stir when the book carne out and which branded Wolfe a racist in the eyes of his more hysterical critics, is only mildly more frank than what you'd hear from a Steven Bochco TV series in 1997. In one last strange inversion, we may have Wolfe to thank for this, at least in part. With courage and consummate skill, he wrote the most popular novel of the decade as a declamation of where it all was heading. But, as they say these days, we seem to have decided not to go there. The Apocalypse that Bonfire pointed to has been averted, for now. This is one prophecy that Tom Wolfe, the most prophetic and gifted writer of his time, got wrong. Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Web Link: The Bonfire of the Vanities | Tom Wolfe | Conservative Book Club The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe , 690 Pages Publisher: Picador, 1987 Rate Book &centerdot; View Ratings Details &centerdot; 12 Ratings BUY NOW Already read it? Rate it!

by Tom Wolfe , 690 Pages Publisher: Picador, 1987 Rate Book &centerdot; View Ratings Details &centerdot; 12 Ratings BUY NOW The incident at the heart of Tom Wolfe’s hilarious first novel is no laughing matter. Sherman McCoy, a well-married $1 million-a-year high-WASP Wall Street bond salesman with a 14-room apartment on Park Avenue, takes a wrong turn while driving his mistress home from Kennedy International Airport, and finds himself lost in the jungle of the east Bronx. Forced to stop his $48,000 Mercedes-Benz and remove what appears to be some sort of road barrier, he panics when approached by two young black men – one large and the other skinny – starts a fight, and leaps into the passenger seat of his car, his mistress having slid over to the wheel. As she races away, the rear end fishtails and ”thok!. . .The skinny boy was no longer standing.” By the next day the boy is in a coma and black agitators are up in arms. But what Mr. Wolfe does with this material is very funny indeed -funny and bitterly satirical.

Everybody gets into the act, from the Bronx District Attorney who is running for re-election, to Peter Fallow, an alcoholic English reporter who is trying to save his sagging career on a daily tabloid. As Fallow’s tipster says about the story: ”And the great thing, Pete, is that this isn’t just one of those passing sensations. This thing gets down to the very structure of the city itself, the class structure, the racial structure, the way the system is put together.” Indeed it does, and in doing so it gives Mr. Wolfe an opening to have delicious fun with the system. And everyone is mocked. Park Avenue social leaders are mocked. Black rabble-rousers are mocked. The criminal justice system is mocked. The rich and the poor of New York City are mocked. Jews and Protestants are mocked. Irish and Italians are mocked. The Bronx is mocked. Manhattan is mocked. And it all gets so wickedly and perversely funny that at one point we find ourselves laughing helplessly even at a scene in which a man dies of a heart attack in a fancy East Side restaurant. Well of course you had to be there. But Mr.

Wolfe lets no prisoners of his comedy escape. So ”The Bonfire of the Vanities” is just vintage Wolfe, you might argue – the author up to his old tricks, doing the satirical turns he did in some of his nine previous books, particularly ”Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” (1970), ”The Painted Word” (1975) and ”From Bauhaus to Our House” (1981). After all, the voice is the same, filled as it is with exclamation points, italicized phrases, phonetic speech, brand names, arcane nomenclature and fugue-like metaphors. The eye for intricate detail is the same, especially where it comes to ethnic behavior and the way people talk. The nose for hypocrisy and cant is the same. All that’s been added is a plot, a cast of fictional characters and the sum greater than its parts that a novel is supposed to add up to. All this may be true, but the additions are hardly to be scoffed at. The plot of ”Bonfire” is an astonishingly intricate machine that manages to mesh at every turn despite its size and complexity.

The characters, while being objects of satire, remain sympathetic enough when it matters to hold our interest and keep us rooting, an amazing feat considering how contemptible most of them can be. It is only what the novel adds up to that may prove troubling to some readers. The closest thing to a hero we get in the story is Sherman McCoy, the Park Avenue bond salesman who becomes ”the Great White Defendant” in the Bronx District Attorney’s political machinations. True, Sherman, like every other major character, is mocked and ridiculed, and much of the trouble he gets into is of his own making; it begins with his cheating on his wife and it is complicated by his allowing himself to be talked by his mistress out of reporting the accident. He lacks the fear of his guilt, let alone the courage of his conviction. Still, he’s the raft we have to cling to in the storm of the novel’s plot. By the end, we get rather attached to him, and Mr. Wolfe has to slap an awkward epilogue onto his story to remind us not to gloat over his survival.

The title of the novel helps – ”The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Think of New York City today as 15th-century Florence, and consider Reverend Bacon of Harlem, who agitates against Sherman McCoy, as Fra Girolamo Savonarola, the celebrated monk whose sermons and exhortations engulfed Florence in a tidal wave of piety, assisted the ouster of the Medici family and led to the famous burning of the vanities. In such a context, it is easy to curse all rabble-rousers, and feel that people like Savonarola – and by metaphorical extension, Reverend Bacon – deserve to be burned at the stake. But viewed in a contemporary context, Mr. Wolfe’s novel seems to be playing with another kind of fire. It may well be true, as he seems to be suggesting, that the history of New York is, much as we may be reluctant to admit it, the history of predominant ethnic coalitions. And he is doubtless justified in exploiting the comedy arising from that fact. But a nervousness creeps into one’s laugh when he makes sport of current black sensitivity to the attitudes of New York City’s whites.

And that nervousness is increased by certain signs that the author himself may be a little nervous. Still, ”The Bonfire of the Vanities” is an impressive performance. In some respects, it’s what Mr. Wolfe has been doing all along. But in other important ways his embrace of fiction has liberated him. All things considered, it allows him to outperform himself. Book Review from The New York Times, by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Question: Who wrote the 1997 novel "The Bonfire of the Vanities"?
Answer: Tom Wolfe